Tag: author

A recent deluge of national studies and reports warns the United States that our future hangs in the balance because our educational system is failing our society. These studies cite projections that American competitiveness is at risk because we have failed to address a growing demographic inevitability—that the segment of the population that is growing the fastest is comprised of those students who are most at risk in our educational system. An expanding body of research (including the...

Seventy-three Latino middle school students participated in a longitudinal study of the preschool antecedents of their mathematics achievement. Path analysis indicated that family resources (parents' educational level, occupation, and income) predicted home literacy activities, which predicted combined early Spanish literacy and English language proficiencies at kindergarten entry, which predicted elementary mathematics achievement, which in turn predicted middle school mathematics...

Despite the intense focus on the achievement gap that exists between African American, Latino, and other students of color and their White counterparts, the achievement gap discourse keeps us locked in the deficit paradigm. This article challenges us to look at the inherent fallacies of the achievement gap discourse and place students' academic struggles in the larger context of social failure including health, wealth, and funding gaps that impede their school success. [ABSTRACT FROM...

The No Child Left Behind Act, the major education initiative of the Bush Administration, was intended to raise educational achievement and close the racial/ethnic achievement gap. Its strategies include focusing schools' attention on raising test scores, mandating better qualified teachers and providing educational choice. Unfortunately, the complex requirements of the law have failed to achieve these goals, and have provoked a number of unintended negative consequences which frequently harm...

Over the past four decades, there have been numerous discussions on student achievement and school failure. Within this time, the debate over the causes and consequences of racial differences in achievement has been at the heart of the nation's social and political life. The author discusses the major developments in achievement research over the past century and examines the foremost explanations given for racial differences in school performance, namely, genetic deficiency, social class...

A substantial disparity exists for academic achievement in science between Black and White primary-school children. A similar gap exists between boys and girls. The extent to which secondary education influences these achievement gaps has not been established. The authors report analyses showing how these science achievement gaps change as a function of secondary education. Analyses of data from a large, nationally representative longitudinal study of academic achievement showed that racial...

A 2-year follow-up of a randomized field experiment previously reported in Science is presented. A subtle intervention to lessen minority students' psychological threat related to being negatively stereotyped in school was tested in an experiment conducted three times with three independent cohorts (N = 133, 149, and 134). The intervention, a series of brief but structured writing assignments focusing students on a self-affirming value, reduced the racial achievement gap. Over 2 years, the...

Success for All is a comprehensive reform model that uses cooperative learning, tutoring, family support services, and extensive professional development to help high-poverty schools succeed with their students. This article reviews research on Success for All with African American students, focusing on evidence that Success for All reduces the achievement gap between African American and White students. More than 40 studies, including a national randomized experiment, have found positive...

Two randomized field experiments tested a social-psychological intervention designed to improve minority student performance and increase our understanding of how psychological threat mediates performance in chronically evaluative real-world environments. We expected that the risk of confirming a negative stereotype aimed at one's group could undermine academic performance in minority students by elevating their level of psychological threat. We tested whether such psychological threat could...

Gender equity initiatives in schools, curricula, and resources, especially reading materials, are intended to resolve equity problems that have withheld opportunity for female students. However, recent literacy assessment in Canada and other part of the world reveal differential patterns in males' and females' achievement in reading and writing. Females outperform males in all areas of reading and writing at the elementary, middle, and secondary levels, and this literacy gap does not narrow...

Recognizing the persistent science achievement gap between inner-city African American students and students from mainstream, White society, this article suggests that the imposition of external standards on inner-city schools will do little to ameliorate this gap because such an approach fails to address the significance of the social and cultural lives of the students. Instead, it is suggested that the use of critical ethnographic research would enable educators to learn from the students...

This reviewed volume reports the results of a large-scale study of bilingual education conducted in the mid- to late-1990s in Miami, Florida, under a grant from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Oiler & Eilers (and their colleagues who contributed to individual chapters) have made a very substantial contribution to the research literature on bilingual education and bilingual development generally. Their quasi-experimental study is exemplary from a design...

The existence of the achievement gap is more than just a black-white issue; contrary to stereotypes, it is a concern within Asian homes. Hmong students underachieve in comparison with many East Asian students. Traditional cultural practices and poverty have been identified as explanatory factors. Our data suggest that a more critical factor might be within-school segregation. Utilising a racial exposure statistic, it was found that the more diverse a school became, the higher the achievement...

The author discusses the achievement gap in science education. He notes that the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) indicated a high number of U.S. students who scored poorly on science literacy and that the score represented the influence of socioeconomic factors. He suggests that education was not been an important factor in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

To maintain the legacy of cutting edge scientific innovation in the United States our country must address the many pressing issues facing science education today. One of the most important issues relating to science education is the under-representation of African Americans and Hispanics in the science, technology, and engineering workforce. Foreshadowing such under-representation in the workforce are the disproportionately low rates of African American and Hispanic students attaining...

The Black-White achievement gap presents perhaps the most important issue in education. Legal actions play a role in the efforts to reduce and eliminate the gap. School finance adequacy litigation offers the most widely used legal strategy to seek fairer outcomes for children. However, the literature is sparse with regard to the impact such litigation has on student outcomes. This article addresses the extent to which adequacy litigation functions as a means of narrowing the achievement gap...